Raspberry Pi

Exploring the Power of Raspberry Pi

What is the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a $35 US computer board that was originally created to help solve the issue of a decline in the computing skills of children in the UK. It has since been
re-purposed by an eager community of hackers and makers and can be found powering projects around the world, including commercial and industrial. In the past 5 years, more than 11 million have been sold worldwide.

Why learn about the Pi

Computers are a fact of life today. Your children know how to use them and more and more they are learning what they are about under the hood. They are becoming creators, not just users. This is your opportunity to be part of this as well.

Computational Thinking

Learning the Raspberry Pi’s goal is to help people to learn about computer science and how to make things with computers. We believe that learning how to create with digital technology will help them people shape an increasingly digital world, and prepare them for the work of the future.

Computational thinking is at the heart of the learning. It covers a broad range of knowledge and skills including, but not limited to:

Logical reasoning – moving from a step to the next logically related step.

Algorithmic thinking – thinking in discrete steps that describe a computational problem that we wish to solve.

Pattern recognition – seeing and understanding the patterns that occur in a computational problem that we wish to solve.

Abstraction – taking specific events and relating them to an idea that describes all the specific events.

Decomposition – breaking a (computational) problem into small steps.

Debugging – determining why a computer program is not working and resolving the problems.

Problem-solving – finding solutions to complex problems

Learning Outcomes for this course

We will cover an introduction to:

Hardware – what is a computer

System on chip

Connectors, types, uses

GPIO (General Purpose Input Output)

Basic electrical circuits

Operating Systems – The foundation of computer software

Linux a different OS

Graphical User Interface

Command Line Interface

Programming – making the computer do what we want:

Programming languages, such as Python

The result, after completion of this course you will:

Have a basic understanding of computational thinking

Understand the basics of computer hardware

Be able to design and build simple electrical circuits

Know that there are different operating systems and compare the differences